Underland
The college course than had the greatest and most lasting impact on me was Geology. It was about the earth, history, nature, time, rocks, artifacts, speculation, stories, and exploration. In other words, it was a lot like reading!
When a friend lent me this volume, and I read the cover blurbs, it immediately intrigued me. But after the first chapter I realized that this was going to be, if it wasn't already, one of the best non-fiction works I'd ever read.
The book essentially follows the writer's investigation of the world beneath the land, the "underland:" the hidden places of earth, natural and man made, the secrets these spaces hold, and the questions they pose.
While much of the book is fact and investigation and discovery, some of it is pure poetry. And early in the book passages like these were a clear indication that whatever type of reader you might be, or prose you might prefer, you were probably going to be more than satisfied with MacFarlane's efforts:
"We tend to imagine stone as inert matter, obdurate in its fixity. But here in the rift it feels instead like a liquid briefly paused in its flow. Seen in deep time, stone folds as strata, gouts as lava, floats as plates, shifts as shingle. Over aeons, rock absorbs, transforms, levitates from seabed to summit. Down here, too, the boundaries between life and not-life are less clear. I think of the discovery of the bones in Aveline's (Aveline’s Hole, Burrington Combe, Mendip, UK. It contained the largest assemblage of Mesolithic human remains yet found anywhere in Britain. The cave was excavated in the 1920s by the UBSS.) shining with calcite, lying promiscuously, almost converted into stone... We are part mineral beings, too - our teeth are reefs, our bones are stones - there is a geology of the body as well as of the land."
Besides its tie-in to Geology, for me the added joy of the book was that I could see, hear, and feel much of what the writer was describing. I'm lucky enough to have been caving, in both wild and "tamed" caves; to have gone cave diving; to have seen and explored "karst" topography, glacial till, the city-beneath-the-city in Edinburgh; to have walked though quarries, deep mines and places like Rock City in southwestern New York. I've drunk water from a spring that traveled through a mountain and spilled out of the side of its lower slopes, and scuba-dived in the cold current of the St. Lawrence River.
And what was even more fun was that most of those adventures I had had were child's play compared to what MacFarlane describes.
His book is divided into sections. In the first, he visits places in Great Britain, a place full of secrets, tombs, mines, history and ancient remains. He visits the Mendips, a mining and caving spot; then he heads over to Boulby where scientists explore space and time from deep within the Earth; then he stops at Epping Forest near London, for what is one of my favorite sections of the book. Here we learn about the visible yet inscrutable network of tree roots and fungal hyphae that literally change one another's purpose and function when they meet and exchange information. Here he wrote:
"From being two hyphal tubes, two fungi are suddenly one, and things can start flowing between them, including genetic material and nuclei. That is why it's so hard to deal with species concepts in fungi, or even the question of what an organism is..."
The next section of the book takes us underground in Europe, to the starless rivers of Karst topography - where a river can drop into a hole, flow for miles underground (continuing to be a river) and then appear again on the side of a cliff, creating a waterfall and resuming its path under the sky. He visits the underground cities that once were at the surface, and have subsided or simply been built over so many times the first iteration is layers deep under foot. Here he writes:
"The extent of our cities' verticality is growing rapidly. With the rise in the number and size of the planet's cities since the mid-twentieth century, and with the development of new technologies, the heights and depths of our cities have stretched to astonishing magnitudes: Pierre Belanger estimates the the 'infrastructure that supports urban life now spans from '10,000 metres below the sea to 25,000 km above the surface of the earth."
And in this same section he reminds the reader that while we are piling city upon city, we are also removing city's-worth of material from other places, in essence res-sculpturing the Earth:
"All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere. Much of Paris was built from its own underland, hewn block by block from the bedrock and hauled up for dressing and placing. Underground stone-quarrying began in earnest toward the end of the twelfth century, and Parisian limestone grew demand not just locally but across France. Lutetian limestone built parts of Notre-Dame and the Louvre..."
In later chapters MacFarlane takes us up to Norway, Finland and Greenland to explore some of the most awful (in the literal sense of the word!) landscapes and formations imaginable.
All through the book are things that, for me, make for an excellent piece of work: new and well-documented information; words I had to look up!; facts, figures, history and essential descriptions; and the writer's own ideas, reflections, imaginings and "felt" experience in his explorations.
This book is more than likely to attract the reader who wants to stop every other sentence and consult a map, or look for more on a topic; and the reader who simply wants to walk along with MacFarlane and watch as he inches through a heart-pounding squeeze in a cave, or climbs up and up a cliff only to drop into another "world" as he descends through a rift.
It's definitely worth the trip!
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